“The Daily Count Book was written by the prisoners who were poets as well.… the writers recorded the total number of prisoners in this file. All the fugitives, or prisoners who were deceased, transferred, or released in a particular day were mentioned in it individually including basic information about each of them.”

There was also Fr Augustine Paździora, parish priest of Końska–Trzyniec, who was arrested in a crackdown on Polish intelligentsia and died in 1940 in KL Gusen I concentration camp. If I’m reading it right, he earned a spot in the list of martyrs of the Catholic Church.

My family history on my Polish side is sketchy, so I don’t know for sure how we’re related, or even if we’re related, aside from having the same uncommon last name.

But there’s something in my heart that’s touched more deeply than I can say by the thought that I share at least a name with a martyr priest who was killed as a threat to the Reich, with a man who did the work of recording the names and stories of the people around him in prison, a clerk who knew that the names were worth writing, a prisoner who was also a poet.